Thursday, May 24, 2012

Guest Post by Sarah Woodbury

It is a stereotype that women in the Middle Ages had two
career options: mother or holy woman, with prostitute or
chattel filling in the gaps between those two.
Whether we like it or not, for the most part this stereotype is
accurate and the status and role of women in that era revolved around these
categories.

This is one reason that when an author sets fiction in this
time, it is difficult to write a self-actualized female character who has
any kind of autonomy or authority over her own life. Thus, it is common
practice to make fictional characters either healers of some sort (thus opening
up a whole array of narrative possibilities for travel and interaction with
interesting people) or to focus on high status women. Such women may or may not actually have had
more autonomy, but their lives didn’t consist of drudgery and child care from
morning until night.

This is not to say that men in the Middle Ages weren’t
equally restricted in their ‘careers’. A serf is a serf after all, of
whatever gender. Men as a whole, however, did have control of women, of
finances, of government, and of the Church, and thus organized and ruled the
world. Literally.

There are obvious exceptions—Eleanor of Aquitaine, anyone?—but
women such as she were one out of thousands upon thousands who were born,
worked, and died within five miles of their home.

At the same time, within Celtic culture, women had the
possibility of greater personal autonomy. In Ireland, where the Roman Church had
less influence, women had a viable place both within the Druid religion
and within the Celtic/Irish Church. Wales, too, was
less subject to the restrictions of the Church. There, women had a higher
status than in Christendom as a whole, including the right to divorce her
husband and societal acceptance of illegitimate children.

The Laws of Women (part of the Laws of Hywel Dda) included
rules that governed marriage and the division of property if a married couple
should separate. Women usually married through contract, but elopement was
allowed, with the provision that if the relationship lasted seven years, a
woman had the same entitlements as if she’d been given to her husband by her
kin.

The Good Knight is the story a young woman, Gwen, who investigates the murder of a King of Wales. She’s a bard’s daughter, which gives her mobility, ambiguity in terms of social status, and an autonomy that any good detective needs. Gwen’s sleuthing takes her from Wales to Dublin and back again, and earns her the trust and confidence of high and low alike.

The Good Knight (A Medieval Mystery)

Intrigue, suspicion, and rivalry among the royal princes casts a shadow on the court of Owain, king of north Wales…

The year is 1143 and King Owain seeks to unite his daughter in marriage with an allied king. But when the groom is murdered on the way to his wedding, the bride’s brother tasks his two best detectives—Gareth, a knight, and Gwen, the daughter of the court bard—with bringing the killer to justice.

And once blame for the murder falls on Gareth himself, Gwen must continue her search for the truth alone, finding unlikely allies in foreign lands, and ultimately uncovering a conspiracy that will shake the political foundations of Wales.